From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Athletic director (commonly, "athletics
director") is a position at many Americancolleges and universities, as well as in larger high
schools and middle schools, which oversees the work of
the coaches and related staff involved in
intercollegiate or interscholastic athletic programs. At some
colleges, the athletic director may hold academic rank but this
practice is on the case. At most colleges, he/she is not a faculty
member but a full-time administrator.

Contents

Position
at Institution

Modern athletic directors are often in a precarious position,
especially at the larger institutions. Although technically in
charge of all of the coaches, they are often far less
well-compensated and also less famous, with few having their own television and radio programs as many coaches now
do. In attempting to deal with misconduct by coaches, they often
find their efforts trumped by a coach's powerful connections,
particularly if he is an established figure with a long-term
winning record. However, in the case of severe coaching misconduct
being proven, often the athletic director will be terminated along
with the offending coach.

Athletic Directors as
Coaches

Formerly, especially at major football-playing institutions,
particularly in the South, the head football coach
was also the "AD". This was usually done in a nominal sense, giving
the coach additional prestige, additional pay, and the knowledge
that the only supervision that he was under was that of the college
president or chancellor
and perhaps an athletics committee, and such supervision was often
token. An associate athletics director actually performed the
functions of athletic director on a daily basis in the name of the
coach. At a few institutions where basketball was the predominant sport the
head men's basketball coach was treated similarly. In recent
decades, this system has been almost entirely abandoned; collegiate
sports, especially in its compliance aspects, has become far too
complicated an undertaking to be run on a part-time basis.
Additionally, most of the old-line coaches who demanded such total
control as a condition of employment have since either retired or
died, leaving in place a new generation who are not desirious of
such an arrangement, if it were to be made available, and
additionally have developed other sources of income, such as shoe
contracts and radio and television appearance fees and endorsement
contracts, that make the income which might come from the
additional duty of athletic director unnecessary.

Increasingly, college athletic directors are less likely to be
retired or active coaches with physical education or sports
administration degrees and more likely to be persons who majored in
business administration or a related field. The budget for a major
athletic department of a large American university is now routinely
at the level of tens of millions of dollars; such enterprises
demand professional management. Athletic directors have their own
professional organization in the U.S., the National
Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics.

Other individuals may be referred to as athletic directors. As
mentioned above, many U.S. high schools have someone who performs this
duty at least on a part-time basis; some school districts have a full-time
director of athletics. Additionally, corporations which sponsor
recreational or competitive sports may employ an athletic
director.